Thursday, July 18, 2013

Now that Nelson Mandela is leaving the stage, we can take stock of his role in
history. His name will remain associated with two major turnarounds: the
conversion of the nonviolent African National Congress (ANC) to the armed
struggle in 1961, and the non-violent transition of South Africa from a white
minority regime to non-racial majority rule in 1994. The latter leads to the
frequent comparison of Mandela with Mahatma Gandhi, but the former was a
conscious break with a policy that was inspired by the same Gandhi.

When the ANC was founded in 1912 (then as Native National
Congress), Gandhi lived in South Africa and led the non-violent struggle of the
Indian community for more equal rights with Europeans, with some success. Note
that Gandhi did not work for the coloureds or blacks, and found it a great
injustice that the diligent Indians were treated on a par with the
"indolent" and "naked" blacks. He did not question the disparity
between black and white, only the ranking of the Indians as black rather than
white. Nevertheless, the budding ANC took over the non-violent strategy typical
of Gandhi’s movement.

Later in India, he would lead the fight for a very ambitious goal, namely home-rule
and finally the full independence of England's largest colony. That was more
than the English would grant him, and in spite of the usual myths, Gandhi's
mass movement (by 1947 a fading memory) contributed but little to the eventual
decolonization. As Clement Attlee, Prime Minister at the time of India's
independence, testified later, Gandhi's importance in the decision to let go of
India was "minimal". In South Africa, however, the stakes were not
that high. The struggle was over the status of the small Indian minority,
without much effect on the British administration. For example, the overzealous
decision to only recognize Christian marriages was a great source of annoyance
to the Indians, but without much importance to the maintenance of colonial
rule: it could easily be reversed on Gandhi's insistence.

The fight for the rights of the Indians was conducted non-violently. The
Mahatma did not tarnish the fight for a noble cause with the use of evil means.
However he was not entirely averse to violence: he took part in the Boer War
(1899-1902) and Second Zulu War (1906) as a voluntary stretcher-bearer and
recruited among Indians to participate in the First World War. His somewhat
naive calculation was that for his sincere cooperation in the war, the British
rulers would grant him political concessions in return.

In Mandela, we see that combination of armed struggle and non-violent political
achievements. In 1961, the ANC noted that the peaceful struggle had only
yielded failure and decline: the blacks were even worse off in the
self-governing South Africa than under British colonial rule. A Gandhian
analysis would be that the ANC had mastered the method of non-violent protest
insufficiently, but it is understandable that the ANC saw as this as a failing method.

Spurred on by younger leaders like Nelson Mandela, the organization founded an
armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe,
"Spear of the Nation". It is no exaggeration to label the policy of
the ANC and Mandela in the following years as "terrorist". When
Mandela was put in prison, he was in possession of a large quantity of weapons
and explosives. Very recently, my compatriot Hélène Passtoors admitted that she
was complicit in a 1983 ANC bomb attack with 19 fatalities and 200 injuries.

As the memory of this face of the ANC dies, we pay more attention to the
Mandela of 1994 and subsequent years. While the armed struggle was bloody but
militarily fruitless, the ANC gained much more on another front: the
mobilization of international public opinion against the Apartheid Government.
This forced the white rulers to negotiate with the released Mandela, who now
showed a lot of conciliatory goodwill. It was due to him that the transfer of
power was peaceful. Later there would nonetheless be a wave of violence against
the whites, with the frequent plaasmoorde
(farm murders), but by then Mandela had already retired from politics.

Like Gandhi, he deserves a nuanced assessment. Both remain associated in our
memory with a non-violent transfer of power, but have had their share of armed
conflict too.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Yoga
is Hindu, but it is not religious. When Hindus go deep into the issues raised
by the San Diego court verdict ("yoga is not Hindu"), they are bound to encounter some problems with their own
tradition.

In
my opinion, Christians who allege that Hindus mix up yoga with the worship of
another supreme being than the jealous god Yahweh, have a point. And Hindus who
think that yoga implies the worship of a Hindu god likewise have a point,-- the
same point. But those are modern Hindus who talk a lot about yoga but are
unlikely to practise it. Contemporay Hinduism is a lot more God-centred than
the ancient originators of yoga, such as Patanjali, or even the late-medieval
pioneers of Hatha Yoga. Ancient Yoga was certainly “Hindu” in any normal use of
the term, but it was not theistic.

On
Rajiv Malhotra’s discussion list, where the verdict is debated, one Hindu
recently quoted Arya Samaj fouder Swami Dayananda Saraswati with approval as asserting
that Yoga is “restraining all activities (vritti-s) of mind (chitta) from all
evil and unrighteous affairs and fixing the same in God alone, for the bliss
and beatitude is Yoga and disobedience of God's injunction and indulgence in evil
thoughts and deeds is Viyoga, i.e., remaining away from God”. I am not sure
about the exactness of this “quote”, but it gives the gist of Dayanada’s
thinking, and it certainly renders the thinking of this particular Hindu and
many millions of contemporary Hindus.

In
reality, yoga is not about evil at all. It restrains good motions of the mind
(i.e. thoughts) as much as evil ones. Hinduism is quite conscious of good and
evil, but unlike Christianity, it subordinates this concern (on which the Christian
core doctrines of hereditary sin and salvation are based) to the concern for
Liberation. Patañjali defines yoga as “restraining the movements of the mind”,
full stop. Dayananda’s additional considerations of good and evil, and
especially his bringing in “God”, are typical of modern devotional Hinduism or bhakti. This very successful movement,
which eclipsed the non-theistic trends in Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta, Sankhya,
Mimansa, Buddhism), is the historical antagonist of Hatha Yoga. It teaches that
Liberation does not mean “isolation” (of consciousness from its objects,
Patañjali’s goal), does not mean identity with the Absolute, but aspires no
higher than watching God face to face, much like Sufi and Christian mysticism.
It also rejects the emphasis yoga puts on techniques. If God’s grace is there
to help you, what use are techniques? By contrast, yoga means reaching the
goal, Liberation, by means of techniques.

The
trouble already started with the Bhagavad Gita. I have it on good Hindu
authority, but I have also seen it for myself, that the Gita is a work of
“synthesis”. Then already, Hindus were enamoured of synthesis. Thus, this is
where we first find the notion of an equality between three disciplines: karma yoga, “the discipline of action”
(then meaning Vedic sacrifice, now moralistically interpreted as good works), jñana yoga, “the discipline of knowledge”
(meaning Upanishadic knowledge of the Self, i.e. yoga proper), and bhakti yoga, “the discipline of
devotion”. In fact, when Yajñavalkya introduces the notion of the Self, he pits
its knowledge against the Vedic rituals. The ancient Vedas and esp. the
Brahmanas (the technical manuals of ritual) are centred on karmakanda, “the (ritual) action half”, while the Upanishads are
centred on jñanakanda, “the knowledge
half”. While yogis would simply choose the latter, the Gita proposes a
synthesis, viz. the third pole, bhakti.

The
book discusses a number of then-popular Hindu philosophies, but interjects in
every chapter one sentence that does not follow from these philosophies at all,
namely that all this shall be given to you if you are but devoted to Me,
Krishna. You can read Patañjali’s Yoga Sutra, but you will not find Krishna
there. You can read the Buddha’s teachings on meditation, but Krishna is not
there. Yoga can perfectly exist without Krishna.

Modern
bhakti Hindus project their own bhakti beliefs on the whole of Hindu history.
They deny the reality of change (both progress and degeneration) in Hindu
history. In fact, it is they who realize the Westerners’ fond image of Hinduism
as frozen in time, unchangeable. So, they rewrite the theory of yoga as dealing
with God. In fact, the more God, the less yoga, and the more yoga, the less
God.

Monday, July 8, 2013

A county judge in San Diego CA has ruled that yoga is not always
religious (Washington Post, 2 July 2013). Parents in a San Diego school
district had complained that yoga is intrinsically intertwined with the Hindu religion
and that its practice in a public school setting violates the constitutional
separation of church and state. The court ruling means that these parents had
it wrong: it is possible to divorce yoga from Hinduism, and that is how the
local school authorities have gone about their yoga classes.

While yoga may be religious in some contexts, and then notably Hindu, it
can also be practised and taught purely for its benefits. Modern school
authorities see these benefits mostly in the form of strength, suppleness and
nervous relaxation, as well as combating aggressiveness and bullying.
Therapists might add the benefit of restoring or at least improving normalcy in
individuals afflicted with burn-out, nervous breakdown, certain complexes and
other mental disorders. Serious practitioners would invoke calmness,
renunciation, even Liberation (howsoever defined), as worthy goals for human
beings who are perfectly healthy from the beginning. But all of them would do
so without reference to Shiva or Ganesha or whichever God it is that Hindu
yogis invoke.

Yoga is intrinsically Hindu

This judgment is part of a broader struggle over the origins and nature
of yoga. Some Christians, apparently including the litigating parents from San
Diego, object that Yoga is intrinsically Hindu and that it serves as a conduit
for Hindu polytheistic God-worship and even for “evil Hindu social mores” such
as caste discrimination, arranged marriage and widow-burning. It is of
course also debated in how far these mores and this polytheism are bound up
with Hinduism, but it is universally agreed that at least as a system of
worship, Hinduism is different from Christianity. For the same reason, these
circles had in the past opposed Transcendental Meditation, a simplified form of
mantra meditation, for being obviously Hindu eventhough advertised as
“scientific”. They had hired specialized lawyers (or “cult busters”) to show
that the various Gurus who seduced Americans into yoga were salesmen of
Hinduism-based cults.

These Christians find odd allies in the Hindus who insist that yoga is
indeed naturally Hindu, and that the bead-counting and incense-waving and
greeting gestures and indeed prayers that Hindu yogis practise all come with
the Yoga package and cannot be divorced from it. They criticize American yoga
aficionados such as many showbiz stars and indeed the San Diego yoga
schoolteachers for reducing yoga to a fitness system without its cultural
roots.

Yoga is up for grabs

On the other side of the divide are those Hindus who say that yoga is
scientific and universal, so that it is only normal for it to take on local
cultural forms wherever it goes. The motorcar was invented in Germany, but few
people driving a Japanese car still remember this. The aeroplane was invented
in America, but this invention is now available to travelers all over the
world. The Chinese don’t put a sign “invented in America” on their planes, nor
do they pay intellectual property rights on them. Of course, Chinese textbooks
have a line or two on the aeroplane’s invention by the Wright brothers, and
that nod to American honour will suffice. As the late Bal Thackeray used
to say: “You cannot take the ‘national produce’ (swadeshi) policy too
far, for then Indians would have to do away with the light bulb.” So, Hindus should
be happy that Americans are willing to practise their yoga, and apart from a
historical detail of origins, India or Hinduism no longer come in the picture.

And this still is a neutral rendering of the viewpoint of a sizable
number of Hindus. We don’t even mention money-makers like Deepak Chopra who try
to obscure yoga’s Hindu origins in order to claim certain yoga techniques as
their own. Some yoga schools, whether manned by native Hindus or by
Christian-born Westerners, have patented their own brand name and techniques so
that nobody, and certainly not Hindu tradition, can claim these. This tendency
is strengthened by the attempt of some Hindus to deny a Hindu identity even to
the worldview they themselves are advertising, e.g. the Hare Krishnas worship
Krishna, a Hindu god par excellence, yet tell Western audiences that they are
not Hindu; or the Ramakrishna Mission, founded in the late 19th
century under the motto “Say with pride, we are Hindus”, now say that their
message is “universal” rather than “narrowly Hindu”.

Again these Hindus find odd allies in many Christians, both of the
lukewarm and of the activist kind. Lukewarm Christians as well as New Age
ex-Christians see yoga as a neutral and universal commodity. For them, it can
be practised as a fitness system without having any serious implications on
their worldview or religion. Just as the European colonizers used the compass
and gunpowder without bothering that these were Chinese inventions, American
yogis have taken yoga for its tangible benefits without bothering about its
Hindu origins. Even the Sanskrit names of the yoga exercises have been
translated, so that you can become an accomplished yogi without even being
reminded of its exotic origins.

Activist Christians, by contrast, admit that yoga is not religiously
neutral. They want to adapt yoga because of its inherent attractiveness and
transform it into “Christian yoga”. To them, yoga has indeed historically been
linked with Hinduism, but can be delinked from it and tied to another religion.
We have even reached the stage where some Christian centres and schools in
India offer classes in “Christian yoga”.

Yoga has Hindu roots

So, the San Diego verdict was a victory for lukewarm Hindus and
adaptable Christians, and a defeat for serious Hindus and doctrine-conscious
Christians. But what do we ourselves make of the issue?

First off, it is a matter of course that Yoga is Hindu. The word “Hindu”
is a very general term encompassing every Indian form of Pagan religion no
matter how old. It is therefore simply silly to say “Yoga is older than
Hinduism”, as salesman Deepak Chopra does. The question then becomes: whether
Yoga can be divorced from Hinduism and given a neutral universal identity, as
claimed by the San Diego yoga teachers, or even relinked to another religion,
as is claimed by the adepts of “Christian Yoga”.

A system of physical fitness, if it is only that, can certainly be
integrated in modern Western or purportedly global culture. The Shetashvatara
Upanishad already says, and the later Hatha Yoga classics more colourfully
assert, that the Yoga practitioner develops a healthy and lustrous body. They
even lure the readers into practice by intimating that one becomes irresistible
to the opposite sex – the very reason why most modern Americans take up Yoga.
Like the aeroplane or the light-bulb, a system of physical fitness can be
exported and inculturated, divested of its original couleur locale.

However, it is worth emphasizing that yoga, and even particularly hatha
yoga, does have Hindu roots, because this seemingly trivial knowledge is
now being challenged. A few academics have claimed that Chinese “internal
alchemy” (neidan) travelled overseas to coastal India and influenced
Indian Siddha yoga and Siddha medicine. A few techniques of hatha yoga
do seem similar to Daoist exercises from China. The influence has been posited
but by no means proven. I am willing to consider it probable, but even then it
was only an influence on a few exercises in a long-existing native
tradition. It is nobody’s case that the Rg-Vedic reference to “muni-s”,
wandering ascetics with ashes over their naked bodies (still recognizable as
the Naga Sadhu-s), or the Upanishadic glorification of the breath as the
key to consciousness and self-mastery, or Patañjali’s description of a whole
yoga system, is due to foreign influence.

Very recently, the American media have gone gaga over a theory claiming
that hatha yoga is very recent and is essentially a gift of the British
colonizers. This can of course not be said for the breathing exercises so
typical of hatha yoga, but many of the postures are said to be standard
exercises of British soldiers, or to be part of Western systems of gymnastics.
Even in this limited form, the claim is ridiculous. The essence of hatha-yogic
postures is relaxation and allowing a steadily-held pose to take its effect
over time. By contrast, Western gymnastics pride themselves on being “dynamic”,
on emphasizing movement and muscle strength. Further, a very physical
circumstance comes in the way: yogic exercises are mostly done on the floor. In
cold England, the floor is avoided, witness the generalized use of chairs and
of the “English” water closet. Any influence would have to be confined to the
standing exercises. At any rate, if at all there was Western influence, it can
never have been more than an influence touching the skin of an already old
native tradition.

But even hatha yoga sees its physical and breathing exercises
only as a means to a higher end: liberation. A fortiori, the ancient yoga
synthesized by Patañjali was totally geared towards liberation, howsoever
defined. The definition of the Buddha’s nirvana (“blowing out”, as of a burning
candle) is to get off from the wheel of reincarnations by stopping its motor,
viz. desire. Patañjali’s definition is less metaphysical: quieting the mind so
that it consciously rests in itself and is not absorbed by its usual objects.
It doesn’t matter whether you believe in reincarnation or an afterlife or
nothing at all: it suffices to let the Self rest in itself, right now. Whatever
liberation may be, it is definitely different from, and incompatible with
Christian salvation.

But this is a goal not pursued in most American yoga studios. They aim
to make singers better singers, caregivers better caregivers, workers better
workers. This has been done before: after the Buddhists had familiarized the
Chinese with meditation, some Confucians still rejected the Buddhist philosophy
of renunciation and liberation but embraced the practice of meditation, just to
"tune their instrument", to function better in society. You can do
this, but it is not the fullness of yoga. Also, all the Western therapeutic
adaptations of yoga, as a treatment of physical or mental ailments, are
designed to make a defective human being normal; while the original yoga was
meant to make normal people liberated. So, by commodifying yoga, Americans are
importing something from India, but not the whole package.

Ghent
University organizes all these interesting events. Just now, I have returned
from a conference on Leonhard Euler, the 18th-century mathematician
and physicist. Enlightenment philosophy and the early history of science are
not my field, but I was intrigued by Euler’s combining the scientific outlook
with a serious commitment to the Christian religion. He polemicized a lot with
the encyclopédistes and other deists
and atheists in defence of his old-time religion.

My suspicion, fostered by the sight of
contemporary polemic between the “new atheists” and the diehard Christians, is
that the exact sciences don’t foster critical thinking about human topics such
as religion. The humanities, starting with philological criticism of the Bible,
then psychology (Sigmund Freud: Religion,
the Future of an Illusion) and sociology, reduce religion to a human
artifact. They really deconstruct actually practiced religion. By contrast, till
today, the faculties of science comprise numerous professors who have
compartmentalized their thinking: critical when doing science, naïve when doing
religion. All the time, you see Evangelical polemicists bring up the names of
scientists who were also, after hours, believing Christians. Thus, Isaac Newton
was a great aficionado of Biblical chronology, predicting the time of the
Second Coming (he reassured his contemporaries that they would not live to see
it; if anything, it was only for the 21st century). Among
contemporary scientists, we hear of neo-Darwinian atheists like Richard
Dawkins, but many more of his colleagues line up on the side of his Christian
opponents.

In his time, Leonhard Euler defended
religion against a rising tide of skepticism and was derided by icons of the
Enlightenment such as Voltaire and Frederick the Great. These incidents in his
admittedly weird biography gave me the impression that, in spite of his
sophistication in science, he was very rustic in matters of religion. At the
same time, his Briefe an eine deutsche
Prinzessin (“Letters to a German Princess”) show that he was also an
anti-fundamentalist: the only way to do science after Copernicus was to
interpret the Biblical passages about nature symbolically, e.g. about the sun
moving and the earth standing still. No special pleading to save the letter of
the Bible from the challenge of science. His Protestant outlook on the Bible also
made him less respectful of the elements of Greek philosophy that had entered
Catholic theology. Thus, a rare case of that overrated influence of theology on
physics is how he could criticize the notion of “emanation” (stemming from
Neoplatonic philosophy, which greatly influenced Christian thought) when
encountering it as a proposed explanation of the phenomenon of light.

Euler set the precedent of how modern
believers could reconcile their religion with the findings of science. Till
today, Christian apologetic works keep on reproducing his approach: sacrifice
the elements from the Bible that cannot be saved, but stand fully by the core
of the Christian religion and declare it off limits to science.Some Christians go all the way and try to
defend a literal reading of the Bible (with the world created in six days), but
they don’t follow Euler’s approach. He, at any rate, did not see science as a
real challenge to the truth of the Bible, moderately interpreted.

It had
seemed to me, until this conference, that Euler was a prototype of the
believing scientist. However, the debates he waged against the ideas he
encountered were far better informed than the naïve religious discourse you
hear from the token Christian scientists today. Whereas nowadays you can build
an academic career as a scientist without ever having to deal with the great
questions of metaphysics and religion, back then it was the done thing for
fledgling science to address these fundamental questions. The basic concepts of
science still had a theological component. Thus, Newton brought God into His
creation by understanding space as an emanation of God.

It
is said that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ca. 1700 (or Johann Wolfgang Goethe,
ca. 1800), was “the last man who knew everything”, i.e. who had a command of
the state of the art in all sciences of his day. Today, this has become
impossible. In this age of specialization, it is even frowned upon if you speak
out on a matter outside your competence. That is another reason for the naïveté
of today’s scientists: a physicist is not supposed to “meddle” in a
metaphysical debate. Back then, it was still possible to be at the forefront of
natural science and be competent on the ultimate questions of being as well.

There
is also a simple fact that helps explain the religious naïveté of most contemporary
scientists as well as the sophistication of the scientists in Euler’s day. Now,
scientists are immediately thrown into a bath of nothing but science, in which
they can develop and show their proficiency. They have to master Euler’s
theorems but also the findings of Albert Einstein, of the quantum physicists
and so much else that has been developed since. By contrast, in Euler’s day,
science was far more limited and left more leisure for other pursuits.
Moreover, students of science first had to study philosophy, typically for two
years, often after they had had a religious upbringing far more thorough than anything
we are used to now. So, they were far more aware of the extra dimensions of
their scientific discoveries.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

(Browsing through my extant articles in the computer, I ran into an unpublished testimony I jotted down in early May 2006. The Ayub Khan referred to as criticizing me has been answered in a chapter of my book The Problem with Secularism, Delhi 2007. I publish it here just for archival reasons.)

In the present case, I didn’t think Ayub Khan’s
hostile but predictable and inconsequential attack on me warranted the
effort.However, my hand has been forced
by the intervention of a certain “John Hopkins”, also operating through a
variety of other false identities.As
per the search engines, none of these have ever been associated with any
intellectual project or book publication worth mentioning.But what I did find is that he has been
advertising himself as an “esoteric consultant”, “intuition trainer” and
“clairvoyant” in Germany, Austria and Thailand.I surmise that the contradiction between his money-making status as an
occultist and his aspirations to be acknowledged by academics as a serious
researcher explains his attempts to cover his tracks by means of
pseudonyms.

The fellow also advertises himself as a trainer of
meditation teachers.Mind you, not just
a meditation expert, not just a teacher of meditation, but a teacher to
aspiring teachers (i.e. experienced practitioners) of meditation.That should conjure up the image of an
accomplished yogi, dignified, cool, with a radiant peace of mind.In the reality of our internet discussions,
however, he turned out to be just the opposite: immature, chaotic, spiteful,
obsessed, hyper-aggressive and simply nasty.Maybe it really is the same person, but once sober and once on drugs.

In April-July 2005, this character made a series of
appearances on the IndianCivilization@yahoogroups.com
internet discussion list, distinguishing himself by a diarrhoea of
insinuations, insults and nonsensical jumps in topical focus, all in unfinished
sentences in ungrammatical English, and either unsigned or signed with false names.
“John Hopkins” also briefly tried his luck on the academic list Indo-Eurasian_Research@yahoogroups.com,
where the august professors gave him the cold shoulder when he tried to derail
a discussion of Indo-European origins into a political discussion of the New
Right, one of his obsessions.

His main obsession, however, was Nazism, which may be
understandable in a German or Austrian, so in every corner he tried to see
Nazism, a topic quite unrelated to Indian civilization.He was extremely self-centred and held it
against people as a serious ground for suspicion if they hadn’t read and
approved the latest book that he himself happened to have read.Because of his impolite and destructive conduct,
he was repeatedly barred from further participation on the IndianCivilization
list, but came back, twice through a new name and address, once through the
address of what is probably a really existing other person, though again I
can’t be sure it wasn’t yet another alias.The latter person unsubscribed himself when the moderator asked him to
come clean about his identity.

His presence soon became a crusade against Hinduism
and Hindu self-defence as well as against me personally.On his labyrinthine website, now defunct, he
posted some interesting and decent articles about European or general religious
history, but when it came to India or Hinduism, he merely reproduced all the
worn-out secularist hate rhetoric.Typically, he tried to reduce colonial-age Indian religious and
political phenomena (Arya Samaj reformism, organized Sanatani traditionalism,
Gandhism, Hindu nationalism, etc.) to the impact of Western occult movements
and secret societies like Theosophy and Freemasonry, thus combining a still-common
Eurocentrism with his personal penchant for the occult.

In the rare instances of original research, there was
reason to suspect cheating.Thus, in a
purported field report from Orissa about Hindu-Christian tensions there, he
made an alleged RSS spokesman say that his chief worry was Dalit
assertiveness.This is something which
Christians always allege of the RSS, viz. that it’s an upper-caste movement
whose animus against Christian missionaries is but a cover for the desire to
keep the low castes in bondage; whereas RSS men are trained to ignore caste
(when you ask their caste, they say “Hindu”), and whereas no upper-caste
chauvinists, RSS or non-RSS, would ever use the intrinsically anti-Hindu
neologism Dalit (which, like Adivasi
or “aboriginal”, is a falsely native-sounding recent Christian coinage) nor
declare himself opposed to the advancement of the lower castes.So there we have an RSS crown witness
speaking totally out of character but perfectly acting the part which the
enemies of Hindu society always impute to the RSS; and this with no name or
otherwise verifiable reference given.I
think it’s safe to surmise that such a “testimonony” has been made up.

It is common enough even for normal and well-meaning
intellectuals to switch to the hate mode when discussing Hindu revivalism.The reason is simply that people mainly go by
the information that has been fed to them.Life is short and there’s only so much information that you can go and
check at the source, and few people care to do so in the case of a seemingly
unimportant topic like Hindu politics.Since the concert of anti-Hindu reporting is rarely interrupted by a
corrective voice, you can spend a career parroting anti-Hindu “information”
without even realizing that something is amiss.But if you then do get to hear such a corrective voice, you may feel
highly embarrassed for having been fooled all this time by your trusted
“secularist” sources.At that point, you
can either revise your position, thus putting yourself in the despised camp of
the objective reporters, routinely denounced as “Hindutva apologists”; or you
can cling to the more profitable dominant camp and try to stamp out the
dissident voices.It seems that, after
having encountered my criticism of the secularist make-believe discourse
somewhere, John Hopkins has made his choice and reconfirmed his adherence to
the anti-Hindu camp.

In a grotesque application of the “straw man”
technique of argument distortion, “John Hopkins” frequently attributed
political opinions or associations to me which weren’t mine.Thus, from the fact that I had attested that
Georges Dumézil’s theory of “Indo-European trifunctionality” had gained wide
acceptance, against his own uninformed claim that it had been generally
rejected, he somehow deduced that I share any and every position ever taken by
Dumézil.When refuted, he simply
levelled yet another claim about my supposed viewpoints, then another, and yet
another.Clearly, his crusade by then
was not so much against a scholarly theory or political ideology, but against
my person.Let me tell you, it’s no fun
being stalked by such a deranged character.

Among his personal attacks on me, he repeatedly
included the claim that my “research methodology had been discredited”, with
link to the electronic version of Ayub Khan’s review of the book based on my
doctoral research.Poor John clearly
wasn’t familiar with the academic procedure which yields the doctor’s title of
which he himself seemed so envious.Mutual criticism is normal between researchers, and a doctoral defence
in particular typically contains fierce criticism of the promovendus’s
methodology by at least one of the jury members,-- who nonetheless adds his
signature to the doctoral diploma.Outsider
Hopkins himself, by contrast, considered criticism as something extremely
dramatic.His own bad conscience seemed
to make him panicky at the very sight of criticism, as if it reminded him of
the possibility that someone may expose his own frauds.

In conclusion, let me say that I greatly regret the
personal animosity between this multi-masked character and myself.After all, I too have on occasion been guilty
of rhetorical excesses, and the topics that interested John Hopkins are or have
been topics of interest to me as well.In better circumstances, we might have been friends.The record shows that I have done nothing
whatsoever to provoke his ire, and that I have maintained a correct debating
style long after his own lapsing into smears and insults.It was his own fancy to attack me in reaction
to my publicly known positions on certain philosophical, historical and
political topics.

Monday, July 1, 2013

Palestinian
singer Mohammed Assaf is providing his people with a different role model than
the holy warrior or suicide bomber. He won the song contest Arab Idol, much to the enthusiasm of his
compatriots. The Palestinian struggle is not my struggle, but I acknowledge
everyone’s right to advocate his own nation’s interests. It is better to do
this with music than with terror.

The Flemish
daily De Standaard (24 June 2013)
hailed his victory with the title: Idool
wordt icoon, i.e. “Idol becomes icon”. This pro-Islamic paper doesn’t seem
to realize that it highlights two un-Islamic concepts. An “idol” is a sculpture
of a Pagan god, an “icon” is a painting of the Christian saviour. Both are
un-Islamic by being associated with other religions as well as by being
depictions.

The young
singer has already been arrested many times by the Islamic Hamas government.
Mohammed was against music, and therefore Moghul emperor Aurangzeb (against
whom the former palace artists held a demonstration carrying a coffin of the
Muse) and Ayatollah Khomeini did away with it. There is no such thing as
"Muslim music", only universal music which many Muslims happen to
like, in spite of Islam. Music brings out their common humanity underneath the
added layer of Islam.

Already the
younger generation asks what the California textbook affair was. Now that
California has been endowed with a Hindu awareness month (in a resolution
co-authored by the Hindu American Foundation, Indian Express, 26 June 2013), the first one scheduled for this
coming October, Hindus are enthusiastic that they will be able to show off
their culture. But past experience shows that Hindus are not good at selling
Hinduism, both because they misjudge their audience and because they don’t know
their own tradition very well. The California textbook affair was a painful
case in point.

The California textbook controversy

During the cold part of 2005-2006, the Hindu
community in the USA lived in expectation of a school history textbook reform
in which Hinduism would get a fairer deal and no longer be reduced to hateful
stereotypes. All it took was to use the opportunities provided by the system, viz.
to propose edits that were historically and philosophically impeccable and then focus the attention
on the dimension of equal treatment in the textbooks for all religions. After
all, Christian, Jewish and Muslim lobbies were having a decisive say in the
portrayal of their own belief systems, with the irrational or inhumane points
whitewashed or kept out of view. Given the fashion of multiculturalism and
cultural relativism, it was in the fitness of things that the judgmental
Christian account of Hinduism would now be replaced with something more
objective, even with a Hindu self-description. But that was not to be.

Two Hindu organizations, the Hindu Education
Foundation and the Vedic Foundation, handed in a list of edits they proposed to
be made to the extant Hinduism chapter. Some of these alarmed a handful of
anti-Hindu pressure groups and a few like-minded academics, among them Michael
Witzel and Stanley Wolpert. They pressured the California Board of Education
(CBE) to reject the “Hindu communalist” proposals. Though entering the fray as
accusers, they were then invited to sit in judgment upon the controversial edits.
This led to Hindu protests, and after everyone had his say, the CBE let Witzel
and pro-Hindu emeritus professor Shiva Bajpai work out a compromise. Where they
did not agree, viz. on most of the really controversial points, the CBE kept
the old version, or in other words, it rejected the Hindu alternative. All the
anti-Hindu lobbies cried victory. So did the HEF, pleading that 70% of the
proposed edits had been accepted. Yes, but those were only the
non-controversial points. Wherever an edit had really been debated, the Hindu proposals
had been overruled. Briefly, it was a smashing defeat for the Hindu parents.

The anti-Hindu hate group Friends Of South Asia
observed in its comments on the proposed edits, they show a replacement of
philosophical with religious views, e.g. substituting “God-realization” where
the textbooks had “self-realization”. If there is any victory in there, it is
that of a sentimental anti-intellectual Hinduism over the more mature (though
more ancient) and more skeptical Vedic philosophies. To the enemy’s glee, the
edits, while totally impotent in their pretence at replacing the established
anti-Hindu views, were successful in settling some intra-Hindu scores. The most
demeaning trends in modern Hinduism joined hands, esp. the Arya Samaj cum
ISKCON adoption of quasi-Protestant monotheism, hence several replacements of
‘gods’ with ‘God’ or ‘various manifestations of God’, obviously stemming from
an aversion to or embarrassment with the polytheistic term ‘gods’. Apart from
being untruthful, such attempts at covering up Vedic polytheism are also
downright silly for being hopelessly transparent and unconvincing. Any
Christian or Muslim seeing a Diwali display (Saraswati, Lakshmi, Ganesha) will
recognize Hinduism as polytheistic and idolatrous par excellence, and any
denial of it in Hindu-dictated textbooks will only add the extra impression
that Hindus are liars.

As the Wikipedia (California Textbook
Controversy) points out: “The subcommittee approved some 70 changes but it
rejected proposed major revisions from VF and HEF on monotheism, women's
rights, the caste system and migration theories.” Wikipedia is not always
reliable, but it is a good measure of the dominant opinion. In this case, it also
happens to be truthful.

Hindu claims of victory

One of the odd things about the California
textbook controversy is that the Hindu side refused to face its defeat. They
went to Court to overrule their defeat at the CBE, then still refused to face their
defeat at the Court. I made quite a few enemies by simply pointing out the fact of Hindu defeat. I am giving my
feedback in order to spare Hindus a repeat of such defeats. But it seems some
Hindus prefer more defeats to a critical analysis of where the past defeats
came from.

The best proof of the Hindu humiliation is that
a group of Hindus went to court to get the CBE decision judicially overruled.
They set up a pressure group, California Parents for Equalization of
Educational Materials (CAPEEM). In the phase called “discovery”, where both
parties have to make available all documents in their possession demanded by
the court, mostly at the request of the other party, some facts on the
anti-Hindu lobby came out that ought to have been incriminating. A CAPEEM
spokesman reported that a lot of evidence of the close cooperation between the
court-appointed “experts” and anti-Hindu groups including Evangelical Churches
and terrorist groups came to light. But that was not enough for CAPEEM to score
a courtroom victory regarding the political issue at stake here, viz. the
blatant inequality between the Abrahamic religions and Hinduism, which alone
gets to suffer a schoolbook description imposed by its declared enemies. For a
standard opinion, we may quote from Wikipedia again: “On February 25, 2009, the
California Federal Court dismissed all CAPEEM claims and demands regarding
content, and (…) the Court left the schoolbooks untouched. On June 2, 2009, the
Court finally dismissed the case, with prejudice, meaning it cannot be raised
again. (..) With this ruling the case was closed, nearly 5 years after the
fact.”

The painful fact remains that all the suspense
and the huge expenses incurred for the court proceedings could have been
avoided, not by swallowing defeat but by achieving victory and justice to
Hinduism in an earlier stage of the proceedings, free of cost. Namely, the
edits proposed could have been crafted to such effect that they would have won
the day, rather than having been such easy targets, indefensible even during
litigation.

Even after the CAPEEM defeat,
many Hindus continued to claim victory. On the Abhinavagupta yahoo list, late March 2009, a
US-based Hindu wrote to me: “You considered the outcome of the Hindu protests
in the above controversy as a complete failure. But I wish to make the record
straight as it is better to give the facts rather than making sweeping
statements like you have done. We have been successful in correcting some of
the horrendous mistakes. Instead of continuing the AIT as it is, the Witzel
group was made to accept that the there are two points of view: the foreign
origin of the Aryans and the indigenous origin of the Aryans.”

Well of course, there is no
indication that the Witzel group ever doubted the existence of the indigenist
theory. Only, they think it is wrong as well as politically motivated.

He went on: “Though we could not get the AIT /
AMT [Aryan Migration Theory, the velvet
version of the AIT] deleted, the SBE president Glee Johnson announced that
all textbooks will mention the contested nature of the AIT /AMT.”

During a mass meeting, all Hindu
parents could come and utter their complaint. They were appeased with sweet
words and promises by the SBE spokespersons, only to see it all disregarded in
the SBE's final decision. Note that this gullible Hindu doesn’t quote the actual
textbooks, doesn’t prove (or even care to verify) that these promises have
materialized. Hindus can be made happy with mere words.

The American Hindu continued:
“Further the Vedas will be mentioned as Sacred texts instead of calling them as
poems, in spite of the opposition from the Witzel group. The gods and goddesses
will be mentioned as deities. I hope these three points alone will show that
the Hindu protest was not in vain like you wanted to project it.”

Those two points are non-issues.
Whereas Hindus apparently can be made to believe that there is a huge
difference between ‘gods and goddesses’ and ‘deities’, as big as that between
victory and defeat, Witzel c.s. are perfectly aware that these are simply
synonyms. If Hindus are silly enough to treat as victory the replacement of a
term by its synonym, all the better will they swallow real defeats. As for the
Vedas, they are both poems and sacred, in the sense that there are people who
revere them. This is a matter of observable status, not of history. Again, no
controversy there, so no victory.

The elevation of the Vedic poems
to the status of ‘sacred texts’, while descriptively alright, is not that
innocent either in the intra-Hindu quarrels. What is meant here, is that the
Vedas are not of human origin but are a kind of Quran written by God Himself.
In fact, the Vedic hymns are explicitly in the form of human poets addressing
the gods (plural), contrary to the Quran where the imagined Allah is addressing
His prophet or, through him, mankind. The Vedic poets' names are given in the
Anukramanis and sometimes even mentioned or cross-referred in the hymns
themselves. Composing poetry and chanting it was a profession that required
payment, so we even have Danastutis in which poets by way of thanks praise
their sponsors. Allah never did such a thing. But modern Hindus don't want to
stand upright next to the Vedic poets, freethinkers who never crawled before
ancient texts but composed their own. They want to crawl, to turn off their own
thinking faculty and rely on texts, much like Christian Creationists. The great
thing about Hinduism, at its best, is that it does not ultimately idolize a
text but reveres a multiplicity of seers, a type of people that can be born
anywhere and at any time. Modern Hindus could be seers, but instead they choose
to be scripture quoters, or even just scripture worshipers. At any rate, their
enemies do not feel defeated by this denial that the Vedas were compositions by
poets.

So I stand by my diagnosis. On
all substantive points, the Hindu position was soundly defeated, the Witzel
side totally victorious. But by messing up this unique chance at improving the
textbooks within the limits of what was possible and at establishing the Hindu
community as a trustworthy partner of the education authorities, Hindus have
achieved more than just a defeat. They have established for a long time to come
the impression that Hindus are untrustworthy, wily schemers with a reactionary
and obscurantist agenda.

The Hindu unwillingness to face
facts, not just the complicated fact of the Aryan state of the art but even the
very straightforward fact of total defeat, does not bode well. Such denial of
reality in an individual would be deemed pathological. Here it affects a great
many members of the Hindu community. This fact should be the stuff of some
serious soul-searching.

A prediction

It is not as if they hadn’t been
warned of this perfectly predictable outcome. All through this process, I knew
and wrote that the Hindu side was sure to be defeated. On the
IndianCivilization yahoo list, in early November 2005, immediately after the
proposed Hindu edits for the CA textbooks became known, I diagnosed some
crucial ones among them as wrong and as not having a chance to pass. The enemy
can get away with lies, but the power equation is such that Hindus cannot. The
smallest mistake they make will be fully and cruelly exploited by the enemy.
The enemy was mobilized, and the Hindu proposals doomed, by a mere handful of
less-than-impeccable edits:

1) To pretend that the Aryan invasion theory (AIT)
has been discarded, was simply untruthful. The Hindu foundations could simply
have stated that the issue of Vedic origins is disputed. More importantly, they
could have delinked the origins of Hinduism from any theory regarding any
“Aryans”, for, as Shrikant Talageri has convincingly argued, even the AIT
itself accepts that a large part of Hinduism is of “indigenous”, non-Aryan’
origin. But they had been misinformed by OIT triumphalists, whose “little
knowledge is a dangerous thing”. The Hindu tendency to make false claims of
victory was one of the causes of the defeat. Several of the edits were premised
on the assumption that “the AIT has been disproven”, that “nobody believes in
it anymore”, so that the Out-of-India Theory (OIT) has come out victorious. It
is these edits which had drawn the attention of Witzel’s group and set the ball
of the controversy rolling. Now, the assumption is simply not true. There are
strong arguments against the AIT and in favour of an Indian homeland scenario,
alright, but AIT proponents tenaciously swear by certain types of evidence
(horses, chariots) which the Indian homeland theorists have not yet
convincingly accounted for. In fact, till today, many Indo-European linguists
don’t even know about an contemporary Indian homeland theory. In Leipzig,
Germany, an Indo-European conference takes place coming December, and from the
call for papers it transpires that the organizers only know about the
East-European and the Anatolian homeland theory, both of them amounting to an
AIT for India. Moreover, in a debate, as distinct from a physical war, a party
is only defeated when it concedes defeat. As long as it doesn’t concede, the
debate is still on. Now, it is simply a lie to pretend that the AIT has been
abandoned by everyone. It is defended pretty vigorously by powerful academics,
as the California Hindus were to find out.

2) To insist on presenting
temple worship as “monotheistic” was untruthful, or at least an unwarranted
generalization. First of all, with their hazy knowledge and presumptuous
notions about other religions, Hindus don’t know that “monotheism” amounts to
more than “belief in one God”. The Greek word monos does not mean “one”, it means “alone”. It refers to the
“jealous God” who does not tolerate another. If Hinduism believes in such a
God, Hindu claimants should have come equipped with scriptural quotes to this
effect: “For the greater glory of Shiva, smash the statues of the false god
Vishnu!” Failing this, Hindus will have to admit that even their theism is a
different type of religion than monotheist Christianity or Islam. The claim
that Hinduism believes in only one God, albeit an inclusive rather than a
jealous God, is, to put it charitably, an unjustified generalization.While I have learned in the ensuing
discussions that there is such a thing as Vaishnava monotheism, exemplified by
ISKCon (Hare Krishna), fact remains that many Hindu temple-goers worship plural
gods and experience them as plural rather than as faces of a single “God”. The
Vedic seers worshipped many gods, 33 in Yajñavalkya’s count. Some Vedic hymns
are addressed to “Mitra and Varuna”, others even to “all the Gods”. If Hinduism
is monotheistic, then the Vedic seers were not Hindus.

3) To resort to weasel
expressions like “different but equal” in order to deny the inequality of men
and women in Vedic and later Hindu society was silly. And likewise for any
hushing up of caste inequality. Instead, it would have been more correct to
acknowledge that deliberate inequality was a feature of every single premodern
society. Instead of being defensive, Hindus should have aggressively demanded
that, as inequality was a feature of the other religions too, the textbooks
should explicitly discuss it. At any rate, a certain rewording of the existing
text in this sense would have been justified. But anything that even smelled of
caste negationism was sure to backfire. Or have NRIs in all their years in the
West somehow managed not to learn that caste is the one thing that most
Westerners know and hate about
Hinduism? Moreover, while Muslims are known as violent, Hindus are likewise
stereotyped to be hypocritical, and articles about caste never fail to mention
upper-caste hypocrisy, so being caught as whitewashing the Hindu record on
caste is fatal. Again, certain corrections were possible, but denying caste inequality
was inviting trouble.

4) To insist on the Hindiwallah
form "Buddh" instead of the proper Sanskrit form "Buddha",
accepted in English and in most Indian and foreign languages, was boorish,
fully living up to the stereotype of the backward Hindi belt. While not
important in itself, this spelling betrayed the lack of alertness to the
public's standards, and the limited horizon, nay the wilful self-centredness of
certain Hindutva circles.

Hindu scholarship

There is also a political background to be
taken into account. The charge of “history falsification” sounds very familiar
in Hindu contexts because of the much-publicized effort by the BJP government
in India to effect glasnost (openness)
in the Marxist-crafted schoolbooks. The BJP badly mishandled the textbook
reform process in India (2002-2004), a horror show of incompetence. The
textbook overhaul under Murli Manohar Joshi ended in embarrassment, ridicule
and an ultimate massive strengthening of the Marxist hold on the textbooks. The
BJP had set a precedent and associated Hindu advocacy with history
falsification in the minds of the public, a mental impression that could easily
be spoonfed to ignorant outsiders like the California Board of Education.

At a Hindu history-rewriting conference in Delhi
IIC in January 2009, the usual wailing could be heard about the anti-Hindu bias
in the textbooks. No mention was made of the fact that the BJP had been in
charge for six years and that the textbooks had been changed already, only so
miserably that the subsequent Congress-Communist combine had no problem at all
in justifying a return to the anti-Hindu textbooks. The conference had no
session on: “What did we do wrong?” This time around, I suggest that all those
involved in or cheering for the CA textbook edit proposals face their own
failure and do some honest soul-searching.

In the 1990s, under Sita Ram Goel's guidance, an alternative
Hindu school of history was emerging. Today, most people involved (Harsh
Narain, AK Chatterjee, KS Lal, BR Grover, Goel himself) have left this world,
and their precious legacy has been mismanaged and squandered. They have not
been succeeded by a new generation of historians. MM Joshi and his acolytes in
India and the USA have a lot to answer for, but they carry on regardless.

The Hindu defeat in the
textbook controversy was nearly inevitable. Hindus have not invested in
scholarship, so they can not pick its fruits. Let’s talk a language that
successful Hindus will understand: organization, and money. They like to boast
of their success in business, how they are the wealthiest immigrant community
in the US, how India is becoming a superpower, and all that. But they spend
their surplus money on other priorities than scholarship, such as bribing the
powerful: whether the gods, by building temples, or the ruling party. They also
fund anti-Hindu scholars, feeling flattered that somebody wants to study India
at all, and not having the basic discernment to tell friends from enemies. At
any rate, the bottom line is that they still haven’t spent any serious money on
pro-Hindu scholarship, yet are surprised to find that all scholarship is in
enemy hands. They also talk a lot about “organizing”, after the RSS fashion.
The RSS mouthpiece is called Organiser,
and their philosophy is that Hindus have all along lacked nothing but
organization. Well then, organize a contemporaneous scholarly institute to
carry out the research needed for your aims. Not one that you dictate to what
it should find, but one that is guided by the realities it discovers. Better
still, insert scholars sympathetic to the Hindu cause in mainstream
institutions, as the enemy does. But if you are not willing to make the effort
and put the money on the table (or squander it on wasteful court cases ending
in total defeat), then expect to be defeated again and again. I am reminded of SR Goel's observation: “The
RSS has a pickpocket mentality, they hope to get things on the cheap.”

Conclusion

Whoever will take charge of the “Hindu awareness
month” should remain aware of the experiences with textbook reform. Those who
took the initiative to propose the edits were religious people with limited
knowledge of the way of the world, esp. of contemporary American sensibilities.
They surely meant well, but if they had applied their minds to the question of
how the American authorities would react, they could have foreseen the
opposition they encountered. Whoever will take similar initiatives in the
future will need to impress upon himself and on all his supporters that good
intentions are not enough. The hostile power equation imposes serious
constraints, which were ignored this time by the naive Hindu religionists. But the
situation is not all-suffocating and leaves room for manoeuvre to those who
know how to play by the rules.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.